Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Judd Apatow's comedy classic The 40-Year-Old Virgin...
...now getting a re-release in the multiplexes in celebration its 20th anniversary, if you can believe that.
Showing posts with label LESLIE MANN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LESLIE MANN. Show all posts
Friday, August 22, 2025
Thursday, November 26, 2020
A BUBBLING CROODS
Opening today:
The Croods: A New Age--2013's The Croods, an animated feature about a primitive nomadic family struggling to survive, and about the father struggling to adapt to his daughter growing up, was, as I recall, a sweet, mildly amusing film, but nothing that screamed for a sequel. So I was almost as surprised when this one showed up, seven years later, as I was by 2016's Zoolander 2, a decade and a half after the 2001 original.
I was even more surprised that A New Age is better than the original; more imaginative, thematically and visually more interesting.
Once again the central characters are dad Grug, voiced by Nicholas Cage, and his daughter Eep, voiced by Emma Stone. The other Croods are Grug's wife Ugga (Catherine Keener), son Thunk (Clark Duke), younger daughter Theep (Randy Thom) and the formidable Gran (Cloris Leachman), Ugga's bewigged mom. Traveling with them is Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a rather advanced young man who is Eep's love interest and Grug's nemesis. Eep and Guy are starting to talk about striking out on their own.
The movie takes a startling turn when Grug, looking for a stable new homeland to prevent this breakaway, leads his family straight to...a wall. Sure enough, this movie turns into a flexible allegory for both the immigrant experience and the class mobility experience, seen mostly from the point of view of the aspirant have nots rather than the defensive haves.
The wall demarcates the estate of the Bettermans, hubby Phil (Peter Dinklage), wife Hope (Lesley Mann) and daughter Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran), upscale types with amenities like privacy and beds and windows; staring out of the latter is as addictive to young Thunk as television or smartphone screens are in our time. It turns out that the Bettermans knew Guy as a child, and feel duty bound to reclaim him from the Croods.
This sort of thing is trenchant enough, and happily the satire, if it even rises to the level of the term, remains good-natured and unpretentious. But in the final third of The New Age we learn why eating the copious bananas around the Betterman compound is taboo, and after that the movie pretty much goes, well, bananas. It's quite frenetic all the way through, come to that; feverish slapstick sequences are edited to pop hits, and the fanciful fauna we're shown is seriously weird, ranging from pet sloths to a giant sabertooth cat to land sharks to "punch monkeys," so named for exactly the reason you'd guess. There are even multi-eyed spider-wolf hybrids.
The New Age isn't especially deep, but it's admirably freewheeling and festive and heartfelt. It also has a rather rousing cover of "I Think I Love You," performed by Tenacious D, under the end credits.
Friday, December 21, 2012
MIDDLE-AGED CRAZIES
With This is 40, Judd Apatow brings two memorable supporting characters from his 2007 hit Knocked Up to center stage: Debbie and Pete, the heroine’s bickering sister and brother-in-law. It appears that the reason they were such successful characters in the earlier film is precisely because they were supporting characters. This is 40 is well-acted, and it’s not without laughs and strong scenes. But watching these two squabble for more than two hours is, ultimately, more ordeal than pleasure.
L.A. fashion boutique owner and mother of two Debbie, played by Leslie Mann—Mrs. Apatow—is a blonde beauty and a bright-eyed, freaky obsessive. Pete, played by Paul Rudd, manages a struggling record label (he’s gambled big on a Graham Parker album). He’s emotionally recessive in the face of the intensity of his wife and daughters. He regularly retreats to the bathroom when he doesn’t need to relieve himself, just to play handheld electronic games. But he’s not safe from his wife’s intrusion even there.
Even so, for some reason Pete comes off less sympathetically than Debbie, maybe because the underlying dynamic seems to be that he’s no longer in love with his wife—he sometimes fantasizes about being a widower—yet she’s still desperately fascinated by him. In real life, of course, Pete’s trapped and overloaded feelings could awaken compassion, as could his terror at the prospect of admitting to Debbie that they’re on the brink of ruin. But in the movies, even with the always-appealing Rudd playing him, he just seems like a detached skunk who’s not trying. When we see him weeping in his car at one point, the moment falls surprisingly flat.
The movie centers, way too loosely, on the lead-up to a joint 40th and “38th” birthday party for Pete and Debbie, respectively. But it pursues a profusion of subplots, from Debbie’s troubles with her shop employees (Megan Fox and Charlyne Yi) to the growing pains and Lost fixation of her older daughter (Maude Apatow, who’s excellent) to the daddy issues that fuel Debbie and Pete’s dysfunction. Pete’s Dad (Albert Brooks) is a jolly, outrageous deadbeat—with toddlers from his more recent wife!—who shamelessly leeches off his son. Debbie’s Dad (John Lithgow) is the ultimate absentee, a hotshot spinal surgeon who can’t even confidently remember the names of his granddaughters.
I like Apatow, a lot. Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are already classics, I think, two of the best American comedies of the past decade. But his instincts are way off here. He tries to give every little strand, down to Debbie’s efforts to quit smoking or Pete’s cupcake addiction, its own story arc and payoff, and it’s just too much. He lets scenes play too long, and overindulges what appear to be improvisations until they become unfunny.
There’s a lot that’s good about This is 40, and with some fairly merciless cutting it could probably have been made into a decent movie. Not a great one, though, I don’t think. The core situation—affluent married people find themselves facing middle age without having attained a perfectly satisfactory life—isn’t exactly unique, and it lacks the urgency of Apatow’s earlier films. After all, at least they aren’t still virgins.
Make no mistake, the athletic and acrobatic feats captured on film in Cirque du Soliel: Worlds Away are enough to make you believe in superheroes. The performers in the circus franchise’s feature film come across like some other, higher species; some Nietzschean improvement on Homo Sapiens. What they do with their bodies doesn’t seem possible, and yet there they are, clearly doing it.
Considering how jaw-dropping their abilities are, and their beauty and erotic presence, it’s hard to understand why the movie is a bit of a bore. The franchise, started in the early ‘80s by a pair of Canadian street performers, has grown into a worldwide empire, with shows on six continents. It’s a contemporary take on the circus—no animals, a New-Agey, music-driven style and unifying themes to the performances. Worlds Away, directed by Andrew Adamson of Shrek, showcases the seven Cirque du Soleil productions in Las Vegas alone.
I have friends who are serious fans and repeat customers of the live shows, but even they admit that the videos of the performances just aren’t the same. I’m inclined to believe them—I can see how witnessing this stuff live could be overwhelming. But while watching this movie, more than once my chin began to droop toward my chest.
There’s a little bit of story to Worlds Away. An extremely cute gamine (Erica Linz) goes to the circus. In the middle of the act, a hunky aerialist (Igor Zaripov) makes eye contact with her and, distracted by her extreme gamine cuteness, misses his trapeze and plummets into the ring. But instead of going splat, he plunges right through the dirt, and the gamine, rushing to his aid, falls through after him.
She finds herself in a strange alternative avant-garde circus dimension. For the rest of the movie she wanders, accompanied by a grim-looking clown (John Clarke) with a bad case of bed head, from tent to tent, in search of her hunk. Some of her encounters are visually magical—like a lovely staging of “Octopus’s Garden”—and all are eye-popping demonstrations of physical skill and prowess.
But this slender thread of plot isn’t enough to disguise what Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away really is—a commercial, first of all, but also a concert movie. And I would propose that the concert movie, with a handful of rule-proving exceptions, may be the most wearying of all film genres, blunting as it does both the immediacy and excitement of live performance and the narrative pull of cinema.
Oh yeah, it’s in 3-D. I honestly can’t remember one particularly striking effect that this added to the film.
L.A. fashion boutique owner and mother of two Debbie, played by Leslie Mann—Mrs. Apatow—is a blonde beauty and a bright-eyed, freaky obsessive. Pete, played by Paul Rudd, manages a struggling record label (he’s gambled big on a Graham Parker album). He’s emotionally recessive in the face of the intensity of his wife and daughters. He regularly retreats to the bathroom when he doesn’t need to relieve himself, just to play handheld electronic games. But he’s not safe from his wife’s intrusion even there.
Even so, for some reason Pete comes off less sympathetically than Debbie, maybe because the underlying dynamic seems to be that he’s no longer in love with his wife—he sometimes fantasizes about being a widower—yet she’s still desperately fascinated by him. In real life, of course, Pete’s trapped and overloaded feelings could awaken compassion, as could his terror at the prospect of admitting to Debbie that they’re on the brink of ruin. But in the movies, even with the always-appealing Rudd playing him, he just seems like a detached skunk who’s not trying. When we see him weeping in his car at one point, the moment falls surprisingly flat.
The movie centers, way too loosely, on the lead-up to a joint 40th and “38th” birthday party for Pete and Debbie, respectively. But it pursues a profusion of subplots, from Debbie’s troubles with her shop employees (Megan Fox and Charlyne Yi) to the growing pains and Lost fixation of her older daughter (Maude Apatow, who’s excellent) to the daddy issues that fuel Debbie and Pete’s dysfunction. Pete’s Dad (Albert Brooks) is a jolly, outrageous deadbeat—with toddlers from his more recent wife!—who shamelessly leeches off his son. Debbie’s Dad (John Lithgow) is the ultimate absentee, a hotshot spinal surgeon who can’t even confidently remember the names of his granddaughters.
I like Apatow, a lot. Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are already classics, I think, two of the best American comedies of the past decade. But his instincts are way off here. He tries to give every little strand, down to Debbie’s efforts to quit smoking or Pete’s cupcake addiction, its own story arc and payoff, and it’s just too much. He lets scenes play too long, and overindulges what appear to be improvisations until they become unfunny.
There’s a lot that’s good about This is 40, and with some fairly merciless cutting it could probably have been made into a decent movie. Not a great one, though, I don’t think. The core situation—affluent married people find themselves facing middle age without having attained a perfectly satisfactory life—isn’t exactly unique, and it lacks the urgency of Apatow’s earlier films. After all, at least they aren’t still virgins.
Make no mistake, the athletic and acrobatic feats captured on film in Cirque du Soliel: Worlds Away are enough to make you believe in superheroes. The performers in the circus franchise’s feature film come across like some other, higher species; some Nietzschean improvement on Homo Sapiens. What they do with their bodies doesn’t seem possible, and yet there they are, clearly doing it.
Considering how jaw-dropping their abilities are, and their beauty and erotic presence, it’s hard to understand why the movie is a bit of a bore. The franchise, started in the early ‘80s by a pair of Canadian street performers, has grown into a worldwide empire, with shows on six continents. It’s a contemporary take on the circus—no animals, a New-Agey, music-driven style and unifying themes to the performances. Worlds Away, directed by Andrew Adamson of Shrek, showcases the seven Cirque du Soleil productions in Las Vegas alone.
I have friends who are serious fans and repeat customers of the live shows, but even they admit that the videos of the performances just aren’t the same. I’m inclined to believe them—I can see how witnessing this stuff live could be overwhelming. But while watching this movie, more than once my chin began to droop toward my chest.
There’s a little bit of story to Worlds Away. An extremely cute gamine (Erica Linz) goes to the circus. In the middle of the act, a hunky aerialist (Igor Zaripov) makes eye contact with her and, distracted by her extreme gamine cuteness, misses his trapeze and plummets into the ring. But instead of going splat, he plunges right through the dirt, and the gamine, rushing to his aid, falls through after him.
She finds herself in a strange alternative avant-garde circus dimension. For the rest of the movie she wanders, accompanied by a grim-looking clown (John Clarke) with a bad case of bed head, from tent to tent, in search of her hunk. Some of her encounters are visually magical—like a lovely staging of “Octopus’s Garden”—and all are eye-popping demonstrations of physical skill and prowess.
But this slender thread of plot isn’t enough to disguise what Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away really is—a commercial, first of all, but also a concert movie. And I would propose that the concert movie, with a handful of rule-proving exceptions, may be the most wearying of all film genres, blunting as it does both the immediacy and excitement of live performance and the narrative pull of cinema.
Oh yeah, it’s in 3-D. I honestly can’t remember one particularly striking effect that this added to the film.
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